JoeRuelle on Nostr: Fake, okay, but fake what? Fake open source? Fake credible exit? Fake announcements? ...

Fake, okay, but fake what? Fake open source? Fake credible exit? Fake announcements? I'm not sure what about it can be described as fake. Are they selling fake Nike shoes in the lobby? And same for scam. Scam what? Are they a front for something we should know about? I get that you mean fake and scam in a poasty sense, but still your "Bluesky is a scam" headline is a little on the tabloid side.

They've always been pretty clear they're going for a more-decentralised-over time-approach. Sometimes when talking to a normie audience they gloss over the nuance of that, but so does everyone.

And it is getting more decentralised. Right now anyone can spin up an AppView lite on a raspberry, connect that to a few PDSs, add a bespoke relay, etc. (No BlueSky company infra in the mix). Enthusiasts mainly now, but that wasn't possible a few months ago. You've got apps going alpha this month like https://sprk.so that’ll be running their own relay/BGS (first publicly accessible relay in Brazil thats not owned by BlueSky) their own AppView, own CDN, using their own lexicon—didn't have any example like that a few months ago. BlueSky just announced they're moving the directory out, which is the last core infra piece still inside. And if you start inside their hosting then it's getting much easier to pull your repo and your keys out now, even under adversarial conditions.

And there are more apps popping up, a lot of which have no crossover with bsky.app. You've got a github clone in pre-alpha, the repo of which you can host on a Raspberry Pi at home https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core. That's a new thing. Other things like https://recipe.exchange/ which use just the ATProtocol identity, have their own lexicon. The https://whtwnd.com/ longform app pulls directly from PDSs.

So quite a lot of "not Kind1" stuff in the mix, and the argument for bsky.app having too much gravity is more of a Kind1 argument than an “other stuff” argument. These apps aren't competing with bsky.app or even using that lexicon (nobody's gonna want their git discussions to show up on their Kind1 feed).
And even for the pure Kind1 stuff there are a good number of new clients now, albeit piggybacking off bsky lexicon, hosting, etc.

Yes the whole deal is way more centralised than Nostr. Yes if BlueSky the company shut down tomorrow without any warning then people wouldn’t have time to pull their repos out. (Though if Damus shut down their app and relay tomorrow without any warning, that wouldn't be chaos free for Nostr.)

But the point is they're going in the direction they said they would go, and a lot of stuff in your “BlueSky is a Scam” article is now out of date. Can the whole thing ever escape its own black hole gravity? Maybe, maybe not. Place your bets. But it's definitely not a silly thing to suggest it might.

Course Nostr is much better for certain use cases. This B2B stuff I'm doing, ATProtocol would never work for that, no average IT department could digest it. But still though, ATProtocol is not a scam.